More on polling cellphone users
February 1, 2008
Cellphone Numbers Just Don’t Add Much To Political Polling, By Carl Bialik, Wall Street Journal, February 1, 2008.
Should Americans Be Able to Complete the Census Online?
January 31, 2008
Using examples from Canada, Norway, and Australia, this report recommends that the U.S Census Bureau provide an online data collection option for all major household surveys that allow a paper response including the Census and promote the Internet survey response option as a secure, low-cost, and time-saving option. e-Census Unplugged: Why Americans Should Be Able to Complete the Census Online by The Information Technology And Innovation Foundation, January 29, 2008. Given the increasingly digital world that we live in, most Americans will be surprised to learn that they will be unable to complete the 2010 Census online.
Two new developments announced at the beginning of 2008 on which to keep an eye
January 30, 2008
First, on January 18th, an announcement was made on blog.wired.comthat Google will be hosting terabytes of science data. Sources at Google have disclosed that the humble domain, http://research.google.com , will soon provide a home for terabytes of open-source scientific datasets. The storage will be free to scientists and access to the data will be free for all. The project, known as Palimpsest and first previewed to the scientific community at the Science Foo camp at the Googleplex last August, missed its original launch date this week, but will debut soon.
"Data files should contain data."
January 29, 2008
For those tech-types who do their own data munging, here’s a rant from Mark Dominus, a Perl programming wizard who was briefly stymied by trying to process a large data file from Census. As we face these issues daily in my office, I thought I’d share the frustration! Of course, he doesn’t mention where he thinks metadata “should” go but I have a pretty good idea what he would suggest…. ;-)
Connecting the Real to the Representational: Historical Demographic Data in the Town of Pullman, 1880-1940
January 8, 2008
by Andrew H. Bullen The Pullman House History Project is a part of the Pullman State Historic Site’s virtual museum and web site (http://www.pullman-museum.org/) which links together census, city directory, and telephone directory information to describe the people who lived in the town of Pullman, Illinois between 1881 and 1940. This demographic data is linked through a database/XML record system to online maps and Perl programs that allow the data to be represented in various useful combinations.
And we're off.... IASSIST 2008 gets ready to roll!
December 20, 2007
Now I start to fulfill my previous promise to completely and totally abuse my roll as managing editor of the IASSIST Communique to assist me in my roll as Program Chair of IASSIST 2008! I just want to let everyone know that we are off to a booming start. The submission deadline, although a full month earlier than in previous years, has provided a bumper crop of proposals! It seems that we’re all technologists (geeks?
Cellphones Challenge Poll Sampling
December 11, 2007
A new report from the U.S. National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) reports preliminary results that have implications for surveys that rely on telephone interviews. (Wireless Substitution: Early Release of Estimates From the National Health Interview Survey, January – June 2007, by Stephen J. Blumberg, Ph.D., and Julian V. Luke, Division of Health Interview Statistics, National Center for Health Statistics.) more than one out of every eight American homes (13.6%) had only wireless telephones during the first half of 2007 Adults living in poverty (21.
Data Visualisation Websites and Sharing Data
December 9, 2007
Jim sent me a message earlier today about a new data visualisation website that he had discovered: StatCrunch. When I took a look at this site, I encountered an appeal for people to upload and share their data, which struck a familiar chord. It seems that all of these web-based visualisation tools make a similar appeal. This certainly is true of Swivel, Data360 and Many Eyes. Thinking back to an earlier era, statistical package vendors always included some data with their software.
IASSIST 2008 - Call for Papers!
October 29, 2007
Technology of Data: Collection, Communication, Access and Preservation The 34th International Association for Social Science Information Services and Technology (IASSIST) annual conference will be held at the Stanford University, Palo Alto, California, USA, May 27-30, 2008. This year’s conference, Technology of Data: Collection, Communication, Access and Preservation, examines the role of technology and tools in various aspects of the data life cycle. The theme of this conference addresses how technology can affect aspects of data stewardship throughout the data lifecycle.
DISC-UK DataShare Project for Institutional Data Repositories
October 12, 2007
As part of the JISC-funded DISC-UK DataShare project{.moz-txt-link-freetext} in the UK, a State-of-the-Art Review has been written, marking out the current scene on data sharing at the beginning of the project. While the report is UK-focused, it may be of wider interest, and has a very thorough bibliography. DISC-UK is a UK consortium of data support professionals working in departments and academic libraries in universities (Data Information Specialists Committee-United Kingdom). The project is about DISC-UK members (all of whom are also IASSIST members) working with academics and institutional repository managers at the four partner institutions - London School of Economics and the Universities of Edinburgh, Oxford and Southampton - to provide exemplars for sharing research data within institutional repositories (based on EPrints.